The fundamental steps of processing color light-sensitive materials generally include a color developing step and a silver removing step. Thus, an exposed silver halide color photographic material is introduced into a color developing step, where silver halide is reduced with a color developing agent to produce silver and the oxidized color developing agent in turn reacts with a color former (a color coupler) in situ to form a dye intermediate (a leuco dye). Subsequently, the color photographic material having the silver and the dye intermediate imagewise distributed therein is introduced into a silver removing step, where the silver produced in the preceding step is oxidized with an oxidizing agent (usually called a bleaching agent) and dissolved away with a silver ion complexing agent usually called a fixing agent, and at the same time, the dye intermediate in the color photographic material is oxidized with the oxidizing agent to provide a dye image. As a result, only the dye image is formed in the processed photographic material. In addition to the above described two fundamental steps of color development and silver removal, actual development processing involves auxiliary steps for maintaining the photographic and physical quality of the resulting image or for improving the preservability of the image. For example, these auxiliary steps may include a hardening bath for preventing a light-sensitive layer from being excessively softened during photographic processing, a stopping bath for effectively stopping the developing reaction, an image stabilizing bath for stabilizing the image, and a layer removing bath for removing the backing layer on the support.
The above described silver removal step may be conducted in two ways: the first uses two steps individually employing a bleaching bath and a fixing bath; and the second is more simple and is conducted in one step employing a bleach-fixing bath containing both a bleaching agent and a fixing agent to accelerate processing and reduce labor.
In recent years, bleach processing using a ferric ion complex salt (e.g., aminopolycarboxylic acid ferric ion complex salt, particularly iron (III) ethylenediaminetetraacetate complex salt) as a major bleaching component has mainly been employed in the processing of color photographic light-sensitive materials in view of the acceleration and simplification of the bleaching provided thereby and environmental factors.
However, ferric ion complex salts have a comparatively low oxidizing power and, therefore, have insufficient bleaching power. A bleaching or bleach-fixing solution containing such a complex salt as a bleaching agent can attain some desirable objects when bleaching or bleach-fixing a low speed silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material containing, e.g., a silver chlorobromide emulsion as a major component. However, such a solution provides insufficient silver removal due to insufficient bleaching power or requires an unacceptably long time to bleach when processing a high speed, spectrally sensitized silver halide color photographicmaterial containing a silver chlorobromoiodide emulsion or a silver iodobromide emulsion as a major component. This is particularly true for color reversal light-sensitive materials or color negative light-sensitive materials for photographing which comprise an emulsion containing larger amounts of silver.
In color light-sensitive materials, sensitizing dyes are generally employed for the purpose of spectral sensitization. In particular, when a silver halide emulsion containing a large amount of silver or tabular grains having a high aspect ratio is employed in order to achieve high sensitivity, a problem occurs in that sensitizing dyes adsorbed on the surfaces of silver halide grains interfere with the bleaching of silver formed by development of the silver halide.
Bleaching agents other than ferric ion complex salts include persulfates. Persulfates are usually used in a bleaching solution together with a chloride. However, this persulfate-containing bleaching solution has less bleaching ability than ferric ion complex salts, thus requiring a substantially longer period of time for bleaching.
Bleaching agents which do not cause environmental pollution or corrode vessels and apparatus typically have weak bleaching power. Hence, it is desirable to enhance the bleaching power of a bleaching solution or a bleach-fixing solution containing a bleaching agent having a weak bleaching power, particularly when the bleaching agent comprises a ferric ion complex salt or a persulfate.
In order to accelerate bleaching, processing methods wherein two or more kinds of aminopolycarboxylic acid ferric complex salts are employed in combination are described, e.g., in Research Disclosure No. 24033 (April 1984), and in JP-A-60-230653 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application"). However, these methods are also inadequate for obtaining a satisfactorily high bleach accelerating effect.
Recently, the importance of using DIR couplers increases, as higher image quality light-sensitive materials are desired. Also, the amount of DIR couplers being added to light-sensitive materials has increased.
On the other hand, it is known that development inhibitors released from DIR couplers adversely affect desilvering and cause insufficient silver removal when the processing time is shortened. In order to solve this problem, a method is described in JP-A-62-148951 wherein the desilvering property is improved by using a DIR coupler which releases a development inhibitor which further decomposes into a compound having substantially no effect on photographic properties once entered into a color developing solution. However, improvement in the desilvering property using the above described method is inadequate, and furthermore causes the cyan density, particularly the high density portion thereof to decrease due to inferior coloring resulted from insufficient oxidation of the dye intermediates in the processed photographic material during the bleaching step.